Blades of wind energy plants are exposed to external shocks or internal cracks during operation. Furthermore, the blade surfaces can be contaminated by substances such as dust, blood of birds, salt or insects which can decrease the electricity generation efficiency significantly. For this reason, many blade cleaning companies started to appear and a variety of methods for cleaning were suggested. Despite these diverse methods, there has been no study to investigate how effectively to clean the substances in quantitative manner. In this paper, the cleaning efficiency of two rotor blade cleaning methods, brush and water-jet, is examined through experiments by changing operating parameters. Then, the optimal operating conditions for both methods are derived.
